Come this April, CERN will get another weapon in the search
for the infamous Higgs-Boson particle. When particles collide in a
particle accelerator, the collision occurs so briefly that scientists can only
infer what takes place during the collision by analyzing the remaining
components left afterwards. Analyzing that data on the fly takes
a lot of calculations, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has just the
solution; a $6M USD grid array processor that can analyze a trillion bits per
second.

The "Regional Calorimeter Trigger" will have the most throughput of
any single application processor array to date when it is installed in CERN's
Large Hadron Collider this April. The project took almost a decade to
complete with dozens of test trials across various particle accelerations all
over the world.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Well, think of it more as increasing the chance of detecting a collision event, like buying tickets for the lottery. It's not like the phenomenon being detected is big, it's that the chance of it happening in any given volume is small.